Rustie

After setting an audacious pace for electronic music—along with parts of the pop world—a few years ago, Scottish producer Russell Whyte talks about where he's taking things next with his imminent second album, Green Language.

As Rustie, Russell Whyte has been responsible for some of the decade’s most strident electronic music. The 31-year-old Glasgow producer’s 2011 debut Glass Swordsarrived at a time when no one else was even attempting his brand of kaleidoscopic, aggressive, garish beat fare. A year later, his era-encompassing contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series found Whyte grabbing the baton to lead his own movement of similarly-minded producers like a bizarro John Philip Sousa zonked out on Smarties and Mountain Dew; featuring TNGHT’s “R U Ready” 14 months before it became the backbone of Kanye’s “Blood on the Leaves” and Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” 10 months before it became a meme-y #1 smash, the mix doubled as a startlingly clear pop crystal ball.

As we sit down for an interview in the Brooklyn offices of his label, Warp, it’s clear that Whyte’s personal aesthetic is unified beyond his bold sounds: topped off with a pair of bright-red sneakers, he is decked in streetwear coated in the type of you’ll-poke-your-eye-out sharp geometric patterns that adorned Glass Swords’ artwork. His forthcoming follow-up, Green Language, out August 25, is still packed with plenty of aggressive moments—the heady throb of “Raptor”, the Martian boom-bap of Danny Brown launchpad “Attak”—but there’s also tracks where the pointy edges are sanded down a little, too.

“I went kind of quite crazy on Glass Swords,” Whyte tells me in a soft-spoken tone, accompanied by a general reticence that suggests an uncomfortableness in translating his music into words. “I was taking the piss with kitsch sounds and over-the-top silliness. I guess that's what everyone wanted, and a lot of people are making that their own now, so I wanted to do something different and more serious.”

This considered approach to sound-sculpting partially explains the three-year gap between Glass Swords and Green Language, a period of time that saw Whyte scrapping an entire LP’s worth of material that “didn’t feel right as an album.” (As with his impressive “Slasherr” b/w “Triadzz” 12” for UK dance powerhouse Numbers back in 2013, he says he might release the dancier discarded material as one-off singles in the future.) Corralling the vocalists for Green Language’s more pop-indebted cuts—including Brown, grime vet D Double E, and talkbox funk singer Redinho—took time, too. “I've sent out tracks to people in the past, and they'd always say it sounded too busy or that it was too hard to rap over,” he admits. “So I'm learning to leave space for vocalists to do their work and not make the beats too complicated.”

And for all of the everything-at-once feelings Whyte’s music may stir in listeners, he admits that he’s actually “a pretty slow worker” and “not in a rush.” Indeed, he seems to live peacefully in his own headspace, possibly a necessity when making such fantastical sounds.

Pitchfork: How did you originally get into dance culture?

Russell Whyte: I've been DJing for over 15 years—I started when I was 15. The first thing that made me want to buy turntables was seeing the Beastie Boys and Mix Master Mike scratching and cutting on MTV. I was like, "That looks fun." Not many people I knew were playing hip-hop or scratching, but I knew quite a lot of people who were DJs, and they were playing house music and Balearic stuff. They were all going to clubs, taking pills, and listening to trance music, and that was how I got into dance music. Before that, I was into rock and rap.

Green Language artwork:

Pitchfork: Between you, Hudson Mohawke, and the LuckyMe and Numbers labels, there’s a lot of intriguing electronic music coming out of Glasgow now.

RW: It's not really an amazing scene or a hotbed of creativity—that's just the way the lot's made out. From 2006 to 2009, we used to put on little nights trying to do something different from the usual house and techno scene, which has always been the main staple in Glasgow—but not that many people were showing up. We’d occasionally sell out the room, but more often we’d have half-full nights. We were trying to do something a bit different and play music that we wanted to hear. It’s cool that people have picked up on it.